ddek

I wonder if the cultural existence of the 'introvert vs extrovert' idea has reinforced this to a degree. I'm too young to know, but I doubt this was a discussion in the 80s. I'm also not too sure it's a good thing. I've seen introversion used as an excuse to hermit; extroversion as the sole reason to use drugs.

We put limits on ourselves psychologically in all sorts of ways, and we follow the ones we believe. There's a study that showed people who believe willpower is finite have finite willpower. I thought "well obviously, if you had finite willpower you'd know because you'd run out". Maybe we do just think too much?

If I don't feel like running and I go running, about two thirds of the time I feel like running after a few K. It's the same socially. The goal of introspection shouldn't be to freeze in a minute now.

You can create a global gitignore in your home directory. I have ‘.<myname>’ ignored there, so if I ever create a directory with that name I know it’s contents won’t go into source control. That way I don’t have to edit the repositories gitignore with me-specific stuff.

Nice game, works great on mobile

I’m not sure that is the case, but if it is, it’s interesting to me as a fairly extreme example of the free market self regulating.

Space Alert is silly and fun and cooperative. Everyone also is forced to mention Galaxy Trucker as it’s also silly and fun, but the real time nature is quite isolated, and I prefer interactive games. Trading games like Chinatown and Sidereal Confluence often have real time phases for deal-making, of those two Sidereal is the better game by far but Chinatown is the one you’ll actually play. Finally no real time board game list is complete without Captain Sonar, a hyper-competitive 4v4 game of submarine warfare.

If you consider simultaneous turns as a restrained form of real time, then ‘tabletop moba’ Guards of Atlantis 2 is really quite good.

Retention and maintenance is easier than progress. If you get a skill to some level, then stop constructively practicing it, then you’ll allow your ability to slide back a bit but it’ll stay pretty good.

E.g. if you train to run 5k in 15 minutes (vvv hard, will consume much of your life for a long time), then return to a lower volume program, you won’t be able to run as fast but you’ll still be much, much faster than average.

So you prioritise. Pick something to do now, and say ‘I am doing this for June. In July I shall do this other thing.’ Maybe a SMART goal for the month. Stick to your schedule. Once it’s over, don’t forget the skill, but prioritise your new focus.

Having a back-catalog of skills is so much fun. They may only be 80% of what they were but that’s enough for 95% of cases.

Should add that with serious running training it is hard and painful, but more on aggregate. Even when I'm just base building, and maybe doing 1 or 2 'kinda hard but not all out' sessions a week, the accumulated load feels hard.

It's fun to watch numbers go up. No-one thinks that watching numbers go up makes them go up faster. (It probably makes them go up slower in the long run (lol), by encouraging short-term thinking and planning.)

German trains wishing to enter Switzerland need to wait at the border so the DB’s, err, _erratic_ scheduling doesn’t perturb the much more rigorous Swiss system.

My experience of German trains is one train arriving on time, to find my connection is delayed, but actually leaving earlier because the same train 1h before was 54 minutes late and I could get that instead.

my understanding i’d that the ceo who revived waterstones is now reviving BN.

It is on Argos.

In CoL, a few cycle lanes but mainly it's just very quite roads. It works in CoL because motor traffic is so heavily restricted the roads are fairly quiet.

> hope either they or the underwriter collapse shortly after

Has this ever worked? Surely the administrator would just sell the debt at a discount (for them, not you).

Available sick leave is usually shorter, too. Normally 5 days, converted to 10-15 after probation. Usually annual leave is fully made available from the start, though.

I'd argue that having follow a doctrine of agility, communication and cooperation is in itself part of a strategy. It only solves part of the equation, though. Your overall strategy is incoherent if you pair these traits with a long-distance ivory tower goal setting. If you had a process to quickly identify and refine smaller (or sub) objectives you'd use the agility to its potential. Add in some mechanisms to minimise the artifacts of fast-paced agile engineering (e.g. tech debt, bloat), and you have a complete strategy.

There is a relationship, yes, but it’s fairly indirect. More important is simply that the ailments of the US are suffered by the west in general. The UK raised its interest rate this week, by less than the US, but with a feeling that a much larger rise will come in August.

That's a notably beautiful irony.

err, kinda.

The North Circular is a decent enough road if you don't live by it.

I happen to live just by the South Circular, and it's not really a ring road. You wouldn't use it to circumnavigate London, it's just a joined up set of separate roads (of various sizes) that happen to form a vague semi-circle.

I can understand, because AoE4 campaigns are more like interactive documentaries than fun games. High production value, but quite boring IMO. AoE2 tells history as inaccurate character stories, but they're engaging and memorable. (AoE2 also seems to still have better maintenance than AoE4, even now. There's new campaigns and civs coming soon, and the old campaigns are being reworked with better voice acting and co-op mode. If only they'd stop pulling all the fun out of the main 1v1 online map.)

Even though AoE2 campaigns (and EU3/4 events) are inaccurate retellings, they inspired me to read more about the stories. Carefully considered documentaries never did that.

I mean, if you've actually taken MDMA you'll know exactly why it's problematic. In terms of a user, it has a week long comedown, and diminished effects when you take it again soon (about a month) after.

I once went with a friend who was a structural engineer for the British Antarctic Survey, so it’s tenuous, but yes.

I can’t speak for Paris, but London is a major sporting destination.

British sports are completely orthogonal to American sports, so it seems a bit disingenuous to say that ‘no one visits London for sport’ from an American perspective. No Brit will go to the US to watch MLS. Americans care less about Soccer, Rugby and Cricket, but much of the rest of the world does.

London-based Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham are the 7th, 8th and 10th most valuable soccer teams worldwide. Chelsea won the champions league last year. All three teams play in Europe (almost) every year.

Wembley Stadium is the publicly funded national soccer stadium, and hosted the recent Euros final. It is a regular host of European club competition finals, including the Champions League.

Lords is the home of cricket. It hosted the World Cup final a few years ago, and is a mandatory stop on international tours. It almost causes diplomatic incidents if a tour of England skips Lords. London also has The Oval, traditional host to the last test of the summer. Accordingly, many famous test series have been won there.

Wimbledon is the most prestigious and historic tennis tournament in the world. It’s staunch traditionalism is polarising online, but it’s perpetually sold out, and ‘ground passes’ (a ticket to all the smaller courts) have queues for days. I’m an annual queue-er, I’ve met people from all continents.

Honestly I don't see discovery as the issue, at least for us. The waiting list for tennis clubs in London is... another tennis club. (Seriously, we have 500 members and ~500 people waiting. It's the same people on all the other clubs lists.)

There are problems with a club comms app that, to my knowledge, haven't been solved:

Many sports club members don't have smartphones, and don't like smartphones if they have them. You ask these people for contact details and they point you to the Yellow Pages. Most of these people are just social players, but some are in teams. You cannot win a technology argument with them, but your communication system needs to reliably reach them.

Even people who are comfortable with tech will have a 'yet another app' problem. I would. You need to give me a reason to install an app. I don't want your app because its another place I need to look to see messages, and it's yet more notifications that I might miss. Other people have different reasons. To get over my problem, and everyone elses, your offering needs to be rock solid.

All that said, I still think there's space if well executed and integrated with the rest of the club. For example, it should automatically create a channel for people in a box league. It should be integrated with the booking system, and lights (seriously, turning lights on from the phone would be killer). You should have an account balance, which is used for bookings, lights, and the bar.

If you can do all that, then you have something that doesn't yet exist. You've also achieved everything I could do in a few days with a discord bot and some python scripts.

You can, but the setting is a bit hidden and when you're dealing with GenPop you have to assume they won't read anything, and find anything beyond basic features too complex. I mainly use the setting for sharing my timezone. The nice thing about discord is the server admin can precisely say what a server should look like, so people don't need to find and join channels. It's just there.

There's a few good things on with the London meetup groups, but honestly, no.

I just haven't met many interesting people on meetup. The good independent events just use word-of-mouth and get more than enough people. It's best for sports, the park I live next to is really just a huge playing field, through meetup I can play football, touch rugby, or do some circuits there.

I still think it's the main place to advertise/host technical meetups though. I can't think of anywhere else. You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who might come to your event - how will they find you? Are they going to be actively looking for your event, or will you need to reach out?

I'm no huge fan of discord for IRL communities because I like to separate my 'gamer tag' from my real identity, as do most people. I've had this problem lately, I love the discord app but I wish we could make IRL servers with real (or abbreviated, like 'John S.') names. It would be so much easier to manage and mod sports clubs if we could keep comms on it, rather than the email/sms/whatsapp mess we have right now.

Hell, not even the pros.

My work laptop is a 2019 i7 MBP, it struggles with my 4k monitor regardless of scaling. I bought the cheapest mac mini last year to see what the M1 fuss was about, and it has no problem with the 4k screen, even with scaling.

Other OS's? Windows is passable until you start transitioning in and out of full screen. Linux...

I had delta in late October and omicron in early December. I was PCR positive for delta, although I had a mild case. I wasn't allowed to take a PCR test for the December infection, because it was too soon after my delta test and my symptoms were very mild. I did test positive multiple times on LFT, my symptoms matched the 'ultramild' omicron (scratchy throat, slight cough, lower back pain). The day I tested positive for omicron was 4 days after my friends had gathered in a pub, of the 30 of us in attendance 27 tested positive on the same day. The group chat was wild. Some of those that got PCR's were informed they had omicron.

Are you just trying to be obtuse?

Expressing quantities in SI units doesn't require 'base units'. SI prefixes are permitted (milli, micro, kilo, mega...), as are certain exclusions (including minutes, hours, ...).

The Highway Code is not strictly law. I think OP has editorialised the title sensationally.

As someone who knows react fairly well, I'd generally say yes. Building off a component library like Material UI or Chakra I can making basic SPA's is like playing with lego. If all I need is a frontend to a service that, say, plays MIDI recordings on a raspberry pi attached to my digital piano; this is perfect.

The upside is the components are so compose-able once you have them (buttons, forms etc) it's easy to build apps. Also the fundamental idea, UI as a function of state, makes the app much simpler, because invalid states are harder to reach (generally presuming typescript).

The downside is it is quite large time investment to become proficient. The 'UI as a function of state' idea makes some simple things (anything with side effects) awkward, because the raw idiom doesn't allow for it. There are also rabbit holes of complexity you can easily get stuck in, like redux or integrating rxjs, because the simpler ways aren't always obvious.

I feel like the function of state stuff is the tacit knowledge part that is actually most important but I'm kinda skipping it. The bit I like the most is the lego bricks. Building web apps with component libraries and not having to think at all about HTML or CSS if I lower my standards a bit.